The drive to drink for someone with alcohol addiction often transforms from a pursuit of pleasure to a desperate need to ...

Health Affairs' Rob Lott interviews Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health, to discuss addiction as a brain disorder, treatments for ...

What compels someone to keep engaging in alcohol use, even if it damages their health, relationships and well-being? A new ...

For years, addiction was seen as a matter of personal failure—a bad habit or a lack of discipline. People believed those who struggled with substance abuse could stop if they simply wanted to. But ...

While that message has been spread on social media, researchers are just beginning to understand how the devices affect the ...

And nicotine really is addictive. The dopamine it stimulates, particularly in a brain area called the nucleus accumbens, ...

Remarkable scientific progress over the past five decades has helped us develop knowledge of how drugs of abuse induce pleasure, reinforce use, and lead to the compulsive self-administration we call ...

What is addiction, and how can we stop it? The complexities of addiction have stumped scientists for decades. Today, with 48 million Americans over the age of 12 suffering from a substance use ...